By Ken Wyatt
Every small town knows about its forgotten generations. These are the young people small towns raise – but then lose to big cities with jobs and better opportunities.
Walter C. “Chris” Heisler was one such small-town product. He is largely forgotten in this area of western Jackson County and eastern Calhoun County. But his family was rooted in the area – Albion, Springport, Concord, Pulaski. And it is thanks to a niece, Nancy Davis Sparks of Concord, that this story could be related.
Born in the autumn of 1916 on a farm northeast of Albion, Walter was a son of Chris and Jessie Heisler and a product of Springport High School and two great Michigan universities. He served his country as a paratrooper in World War II, dropping behind German lines in that act of massive heroism we know as D-Day.
A POW for 11 months after the invasion, he returned safely to his parents’ farm after the end of the war. During the late ’40s he was active in his home community. But education and career took him far from home.
When he died 15 years ago at age 93, he was a retired professor at the University of Rhode Island. Shortly after his death in on June 6, 2010, a newspaper writer with the Providence Journal wrote these words: “A rich and generous life, the likes of which we will never see again, came to an end at a perfectly improbable time.” Yes, on D-Day.
Both his war experience and his post-war life were part of Heisler’s small-town greatness. Something of both should be reviewed here for the benefit of the community that sent him forth in the world to be a part of great things.
By the time he was drafted in the summer of 1941 at age 24, Heisler had earned a degree in education at Western Michigan University. With that degree, the military sent him to officers training, and he was commissioned a lieutenant in the U.S. Army – a so-called “90-day wonder.”
His unit was the 507th Paratroop Infantry Regiment, a part of the 82nd Airborne Division. Until June of 1944, his service was fairly routine. But early that month his unit was in England preparing for the Allies’ invasion of Normandy.
It would become known as D-Day. One online review called it “a pivotal moment in World War II that marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany and significantly altered the course of the war.”
Years after those events, Heisler described a scene that took place hours before his unit was to be dropped behind German lines in Normandy:
“It was the evening before D-Day,” he wrote. “In an open field somewhere in England, an airborne infantry regiment, surrounded by its planes, had assembled. In less than four hours they would climb into those innumerable C 47s to head for Normandy. In six hours, they would make a night jump behind the enemy’s lines in France. This would be the last time they would be together, and the men stood in hushed anticipation as their regimental commander climbed upon a rough platform of discarded ammunition boxes.
“‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘instead of bowing our heads as is usual in our prayers, I want you to throw back your shoulders and look up into the sky. Up there, somewhere, is the God who will be with us tonight. Look up to Him for guidance.’
“Each man slowly lifted his head to gaze into the twilight while the Colonel made their earnest plea for the Lord’s blessing upon their mission. Many of those men went to meet their God that evening, but those who didn’t will continue to ‘look up to Him’ while they pray for everlasting peace.”
Heisler’s jump took him safely to the ground. But the drop had not been as planned. It took place miles off target. Wandering for two days, he was unable to locate any of his unit on the ground. Instead, he dodged German soldiers.
He did not learn until after the war that just after his jump, his plane was hit by enemy fire. The last four men to jump – including the pilot – were too close to the ground for their ‘chutes to open.
On the second day after his landing, he was captured hiding in a hedgerow. From that point, his life took on nightmarish qualities. He was stripped bare at a village for interrogation by a German officer.
More interrogations followed. He was taken to a POW camp in Poland – OFLAG64. That lasted into the new year. He writes that on Jan. 20, 1945, “my life became like a living nightmare of uncertain endings.” The Russian army was advancing from the east, and was about to overtake the POW camp, so 1,200 or so captive officers were force-marched overland to what turned out to be another POW camp near Hammelburg, Germany.
Of those 1,200 officers, only 423 made it to the new camp in early March.
His full account, written after the war, includes many stories of his captivity. One unusual highlight: He was twice “liberated” by Gen. George Patton. At the first “liberation,” Patton’s troops were unable to transport all the POWs they had freed. The second was successful.
After his return home, Heisler was tending a garden at his parent’s farm one afternoon when a reporter from the Citizen Patriot stopped by to interview him. An article followed on June 24, 1945, headlined “Lt. Heisler Tells of Life in Captivity.”
In it, the 29-year-old veteran officer told of how important gardening had been during his captivity – at least in warm-weather months. It allowed POWs to feed themselves and made the difference “between life and starvation.”
During those five years back home, Heisler managed to earn advanced degrees in education at Michigan State University. Meanwhile, he taught and coached at Springport High School – and also helped a volunteer force build a community gymnasium called “The Arches.”
But in 1950 he left the area to become superintendent of schools in Kingsley, Michigan – north of Cadillac. Four years later he took the same position in Westerly, Rhode Island. A decade later he began teaching at the University of Rhode Island in the education department, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 1988.
It was during his retirement that he and his wife Gloria began returning to the scene of his WWII drop behind enemy lines. Here’s how his obituary summarized that period of his life:
“Mr. Heisler may be best known for his role as an American representative of the fallen Allied troops in Normandy, France. In his later years, Lt. Heisler and his family visited Normandy for D-Day celebrations eight times in seven years, spreading the message that the real heroes of WWII were not the men who came home but those men and women who were buried under the white crosses in Normandy.”
He was no armchair retiree and representative of the fallen troops of Normandy. At one point he actually took another parachuted drop in memory of that historic one of June 6, ’44.
Over time he became such a respected American in France that in 2009 he was awarded the French Medal of Honor.
Near the French town of Negreville the remains of the airplane from which he jumped in 1944 were located. He returned there for the dedication of a monument to the memory of the four Americans who had died when their plane crashed. And if you were to visit Negreville, you would find a plaque dedicating the town square to Walter C. Heisler – a small-town boy from Jackson County, Michigan.
Despite his many accomplishments in war and peace, Heisler struggled for years with bitterness over the failure of the air force to make its night drop as planned. But as he came to learn, those D-Day pilots had to keep radio silence, and many had no navigators – or their navigators were inexperienced in night flying. Finally, though he and many others were unable to carry out their individual missions to connect with their unit, he learned that the overall unit mission was successful. despite the loss of about a third of its men.
“I finally realized that the bitterness I had carried for over 50 years was questionable, to say the least,” he wrote in his memoirs of the war.
Heisler steadfastly declined to call himself a hero, but many others have done so. After his passing, the General Assembly of Rhode Island passed a House resolution honoring its long-time resident as a “man dedicated to his country, a WWII war hero, a professor and humanitarian.”
Most people in his home community knew little or nothing of his war-related achievements. But with this account of how a farm boy of Jackson County made his mark on the world, perhaps others in his home community would agree. Walter Heisler was one heroic farm boy.
